Why I said yes

In November the board asked me to become a trustee, and I said yes. A few people have asked me why, mostly people who know me well enough to know I do not usually say yes to things quickly. This is the answer I have been giving them, written down once.

I have worked on the Foundation’s communications since 2027. Before that, I answered Alexander’s questions about it over coffee, for longer than either of us likes to admit. The work is not complicated. It is mostly making sure that the people who give us money know what it did, and that the families who trust us with their children know what will happen next. For a long time those two things were written in the same voice, and neither was served by it. Now they are written separately, and both are better.

A trusteeship is different. It means being answerable for the Foundation’s direction and its money, not only for how it describes itself. I wanted that responsibility because I had done the work that comes before it, not because of who I know. That mattered to me more than I expected it to.

There is another reason, and I will say it once.

In October 2017, at Portimão, a part on my car failed and I went into a barrier. It broke two vertebrae in my back, and I did not race single-seaters again.

I do not tell that story often, and I am not telling it here so that it will mean something. It is here because it is how I know what our students are up against, and what they are not.

Most of them will not reach Formula 1. Every one of them will stop racing one day, for one reason or another, and usually not on a date they chose. What the Foundation owes them is not a promise about the top of the sport. It is a year in which they are taken seriously: coached properly, told the truth, fed well, taught to look after their own bodies and to read their own data. And it owes them the things that outlast the racing: the habits, the people, and the knowledge that someone thought they were worth it.

When I read the profiles of the Class of 2028 before we published them, that is what I was looking for. Tomás’s braking. Yasmin’s notebook of starts. Marta’s data reviews, which by November she was running without us. Sami in the wet. Not stories about where they came from. Descriptions of what they can do.

As a trustee, my job is to keep us honest about that. To make sure that what we promise families is what we deliver, that the money goes where we said it would, and that as the Foundation grows we do not start telling our students’ stories for them.

The board met in November and the vote was unanimous. Alexander was not in the room.

The 2029 intake arrives at Modena next week. I will be at the kart circuit for the first morning, which is still the part of this I like best.